n take account
of actions only in their tribunals, and not of thoughts and feelings.
Even the various religions make different demands among the different
peoples. Here they require the Sunday to be kept holy, here the
Saturday or Friday. One allows pleasures which another forbids. Even
apart from these differences there is always a wide neutral ground
between what is allowed and what is forbidden; and it is here that
conscience, with her subtler discrimination, raises her voice. She
tells us that _every_ day should be kept sacred to the Lord, that even
permitted interest becomes unjust when exacted from the needy; in a
word, she preaches morality in the bosom of Christian and Jew, of
heathen and savage. For even among uncivilized races which have not
the light of Christianity there is an agreement as to the fundamental
conceptions of good and evil. They, too, recognize the breaking of
promises, lying, treachery, and ingratitude as evil; they, too, hold
as sacred the bond between parents, children, and kinsmen. It is
hard to believe in the universal corruption of mankind, for, however
obscured by savagery and superstition, there lies dormant in every
human breast that feeling for the noble and the beautiful which is the
seed of virtue, and a conscience which points out the right path. Can
there be a more convincing proof of God's existence than this
universal sense of right and wrong, this unanimous recognition of one
law, alike in the physical and in the moral world, except that nature
obeys this law with a full and absolute obedience, while man, who is
free, has the power of violating it?

The body and the reason serve the ruling part of the soul, but they
put forward claims of their own, they have their own share of power,
and thus man's life is a perpetual conflict with self. If in this
conflict the soul, hard-pressed from within and without, does not
always end by obeying the voice of conscience, let us hope that He who
created us imperfect will not require perfection from us.

For consider to what violent storms man is exposed in the voyage of
life, what variety there is in his natural endowments, what
incongruity between education and position in life. It is easy for the
favorite of fortune to keep in the right path; temptation, at any rate
to crime, hardly reaches him; how hard, on the other hand, is it for
the hungry, the uneducated, the passionate man to refrain from evil.
To all this due weight will be give